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8 Summer Wedding Welcome Bag Essentials Your Guests Will Love

Summer weddings frequently fill up a calendar, often leading to the elimination of summer vacation plans or transforming wedding weekends into those summer travels. As a result, many wedding guests travel for summer weddings, staying in hotels and vacation rentals.

For every type of wedding, no matter the season, you want to be able to greet your guests with a little bag of luxuries. As summertime weddings often mean more guests coming in from out of town, you want to be sure to create a wedding welcome bag that reflects the season. In order to build your summer wedding welcome bag and lend your guests a treat upon arrival, be sure to toss in these iconic summer wedding welcome bag essentials.

1. A Summery Bag

Photo from Martha Stewart Weddings

Welcome bags must begin with a good foundation. For your summer wedding, you will want to gift your guests a bag that reflects the season. Bright colors are fair game for summer wedding welcome bags. You can even get creative and stray away from actual bags and go with more inventive options such as pails, picnic baskets or even a beach bag.

2. Retro Postcard of Your Wedding Destination

Nothing quite says summer like taking a little vacation. Your guests might still like to send their friends and family a little note from their travels by way of a postcard. For guests arriving from out of town for your summer wedding, a fun way to welcome them can be with a pre-stamped postcard of the wedding location. Retro and vintage looking postcards will help get guests in the old timey spirit to send a little snail mail of their travels. A postcard in your summer wedding welcome bag presents an easy way to express the destination and give guests something to write home about.

3. Summer Toiletry Must-Haves

Summertime can be filled with extra sunshine, more buzzing bugs and parched skin. For your summer wedding guests, you can lend them some summer toiletry must-haves to ensure the mosquitos don’t bite and the sunburns don’t burn. You can purchase travel-sized toiletries geared toward your summer wedding such as bug repellent, sunscreen, aloe vera and lip balm. Bug repellents and sunscreens now come in wipe form, making it even easier to buy in bulk and dispense amongst your guests’ welcome bags. Every summer wedding welcome bag calls for summertime toiletries to help guests beat the effects of the heat and keep the bugs away.

4. Customized Fan

Even if your summer wedding isn’t being held in the great outdoors, you still want to keep your guests as cool as possible on their travels for your wedding. A customized wedding fan presents a fun way to keep your guests from overheating and also help them forever remember your big day. You can incorporate your wedding logo on to fans for your guests welcome bags or gift them brightly colored fans to reflect the summer spirit.

5. Sparkling Water and Frothy Beers

Photography: Max Wanger

Nothing quite says summer like a nice cold beer. For summer weddings, welcome bags aren’t complete until your guests have some refreshing drinks to enjoy in their hotel room. While you could add regular water to your guests’ welcome bags, sparkling water lends something fizzy for those dog days of summer. And when you crave something even more refreshing, a frothy beer should do the trick. You can toss in local brews to lend your guests a refreshing taste of your wedding destination.

6. Picnic Fare

When brides and grooms must compose welcome bags for their summer weddings, often you merely need to think of items that scream summer. Most welcome bags should come with some snacks to munch on in between wedding events. For the summer wedding, you can keep your snacks in a picnic theme to reflect the season. Popcorn, crackers, chips, moon pies and even mini bottles of wine can fill up welcome bags and even help guests have their own summer picnic while traveling for your wedding.

7. A Deck of Cards

Lazy days of summer with friends and family are often spent drinking refreshing beverages, barbecuing and maybe even playing a lawn or card game. To keep your summer wedding guests entertained, you can throw in a deck of cards to each welcome bag. You can either have a deck customized to your wedding theme or purchase cards that feature different scenes of your wedding location, often sold at tourism offices. For my summer wedding, I supplied my guests with a deck of cards reflecting my favorite baseball team, also in keeping with a summery theme.

8. Flip-flops

Summer often translates into sandal weather. For your guests checking in for your wedding, you want to be sure they have the proper footwear to lounge poolside and soak up the sun. You can buy flip-flops to add to your welcome bags to not only further your summer wedding theme but also give your guests proper summer shoe apparel. Just like the fans or the deck of cards, you can also have the flip-flops customized to fit your wedding colors or theme.

Your Turn…

Composing a welcome bag for your guests that is both a treat and also practical for the season is not always easy. Summer wedding welcome bag building involves thinking about classic summer themes and also practicalities you might need to survive the heat of the season. Did you have a summer wedding? What essentials did you include in your guests welcome bags?

After a childhood of keeping road trips interesting around the U.S, stints in Western Europe as an angsty teen and a study abroad year in Italy in college, I decided to make traveling and writing my way of living. My travels are laced with hints of a redheaded temperament, proof that my hair color is indeed natural. SuzyGuese.com is where I solve packing predicaments, blurt out my travel secrets, rant about nomad injustices and share where the road takes me in hopes that it might take you there too.